I enjoyed Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close--not enough to want to read Everything is Illuminated, mind you, but enough to think, Well, that wasn't a complete waste of time. And, admittedly, I dont know much about his new book, Eating Animals, but I do know this: he is beginning to piss me off. He may have converted Natalie Portman, but if there's one thing I despise, it's self-righteousness:

... [W]hat Foer most bravely details is how eating animal pollutes not only our backyards, but also our beliefs. He reminds us that our food is symbolic of what we believe in, and that eating is how we demonstrate to ourselves and to others our beliefs: Catholics take communion--in which food and drink represent body and blood. Jews use salty water on Passover to remind them of the slaves' bitter tears. And on Thanksgiving, Americans use succotash and slaughter to tell our own creation myth--how the Pilgrims learned from Native Americans to harvest this land and make it their own.

I get it: meat-eaters are violent, genocidal maniacs who kill poor, defenseless animals in order to feel superior.

If this is the best you can come up with, I'm not convinced. What's more, self-righteousness always has an adverse effect on me--if anything, I often side with the camp who annoys me the least. Framing the vegetarianism debate--a debate which shouldn't even be happening--as an ethical one is absurd. The only thing I'm taking from this is that Foer vegetarianism is the new Christianity: convert people by disgusting them (That burger you're eating probably got mixed with cowshit--you're eating cowshit!), and if that doesn't work, tell them they're immoral, and attempt to make them feel bad for their heathen, meat-eating ways. But conversion tactics often masquerade as self-validation (see Kirk Cameron, Christianity's latest pitchman): you don't feel so out of place when you have everyone eating a salad.

The problem, however, is that the meat-versus-vegetables debate isn't a matter of ethics, and no amount of righteous indignation will change that. It's tempting to dismiss Foer as an asshole, but he only strikes me as strangely passionate. (Remember when that Baldwin brother became a religious nutcase, with humorous and annoying results?) Still, played correctly, Foer as vegetarian Christ-figure, with Portman as his Mary Magdalene, could be comical--if, like Cameron and the Baldwin brother, the two of them weren't so irritating.

Comments

[Jordan]

Sounds like a shame all of this came up before you got a chance to read Everything is Illuminated. That's all I've read of his so far, and it makes me want to read everything else regardless of what nonsense it sounds like it will probably be.

[Citizen Reader]

I was never really irritated by JSF, and I can't say I really am now, it's just a matter of not understanding his appeal: I mainly just find him kind of boring, and believe that most of his notoriety comes from picking subjects that press emotional buttons (9/11, animals with cute little faces that meat-eaters are KILLING) and working it.

I think your point about the "gross-out" not being the best persuasive tool is spot on. Frankly, if all it was going to take to change our ways was the gross-out, Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle" would have turned us all off meat years ago. At some point, let's face it, we run out of time and options. Do I know the chicken I bought over the weekend is probably chock full o' antibiotics and didn't have a very nice life? Yes, I do. Does this make me feel good about buying it? No. Am I running out of options, because I have finite time and resources, and I'm trying to eat less red meat (for other health reasons), and I don't have time to go to the health store and buy beans and figure out interesting recipes to use those beans? Yes.

Until we address the economics and basic wrong-ness of being able to buy a chicken sandwich or beef taco for 99 cents, our meat consumption (and everything bad that goes with it) is going to continue. Because, physiologically speaking, a salad just doesn't fill you up the way some protein does, and it usually costs a lot more. So JSF can call me a murdering asshole all he wants. I grew up on a farm and believe that animals should be raised (and killed) respectfully, and I try to support that with the types of food I buy, as well as striving for diet moderation. But until I write a couple overhyped and mediocre novels, I'm stuck making food choices in the real world.